Pavia

Pavia is a town located in the Lombardy region, approximately 40 km south of Milan. With its 70.000 inhabitants, Pavia has a strong historical and cultural heritage, and is also known for having one of the oldest Italian universities: Università degli Studi di Pavia. As a result, Pavia has a constant and substantial inflow of non-resident population, both students and high-skilled workers, who contribute to the local cultural, social as well as civic environment.
In November 2016, the municipality of Pavia completed its first participatory budgeting process, and in January 2017 started a second process, that will be concluded in November 2017.
Pavia’s municipality approved a 3-year program for participatory budgeting. Since its first edition, Pavia PB was open for participation to all residents older than 16 years old, as well as students and staff of the University of Pavia as primary city users. For the first time, students have been invited to take an active part to a decision-making process concerning the city’s resources allocation and future development. 20 projects overall made it to the voting phase.

EMPATIA platform provided support to the entire process.
Online voting was available to registered users, all authenticated through phone number and fiscal code: the system sent a verification code on the phone number provided, while making sure that the fiscal code provided matched the one in the civil registry.
Offline voting was enable with the support of authorized staff, to allow citizens with weak digital literacy to easily contribute to the process. This staff, on selected locations, supported citizens on registering, entering proposals, and showing voting polling stations.
Both in the online and offline procedures, votes have been uploaded on the platform – either directly or by authorized staff – but they have been kept separated to provide a more accurate insight on voting trends in the assessment phase.